By Sallie Brady The Duke of Devonshire is cleaning house, and collectors, dealers and curators are descending on his Chatsworth estate for a historic auction conducted by Sotheby’s. Forget the 2009 Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Bergé sale. For anyone who is … Continue reading →

Ancient Egypt has always inspired awe. Part of its power lies in the grandeur of its ruins, the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” that Shelley described in his sonnetOzymandias. Part of it is sheer age. Founded over 5,000 years ago, Egyptian dynastic civilization seemed ancient even to the ancients: In Plato’s Timaeus, an Egyptian priest tells Solon that compared to his own people, “you Hellenes are never anything but children.” Continue reading →

If you wander around shops in a city like New York, looking at old maps for their beauty alone in the company of dealers like Harry Newman at The Old Print Shop; or Paul Cohen and Henry Tagliaferro at Arkway; or Graham Arader of Arader Galleries; or Richard Lan, Robert Augustyn and James Roy at Martayan Lan, you could be forgiven for forgetting something important. Continue reading →

Toy soldiers have been around for millennia—tiny warrior figurines were found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, and the ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed them as well—but it was the Britons of the Victorian era who made them a Christmas-morning must for generations of would-be generals. Toy soldiers fired the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson, who romanticized their power to enliven a childhood sick day in his poem The Land of Counterpane, and that of H.G. Wells, who wrote an entire book,Little Wars, on war-gaming with toy soldiers. Continue reading →